“I don’t know how you guys do it.” We get that a lot, I mean A LOT from people when they hear we’re doing this long-long distance relationship thing. Especially when we tell them that it’s been going on for five years. Sometimes it sounds like a compliment and other it seems like a disbelieving challenge. No matter how it’s intended it always hits our ears with a tinge of pain for in those days when we are together, those fleeting moments that come sparsely through the year the last thing we want to think about is the times that we spend apart.
That is unfortunately how we spend the vast majority of our time, often eight months out of a year we are six time zones away from one another, a greater distance than opposite coasts of the United States. Even just saying that we’re an ocean apart does not do it justice since there is still a great deal my continent left to travel once we cross the waves. As one might expect such a vast span of separation makes for a great number of difficulties which must be overcome to make our relationship work, we, in fact, concede that without certain marvels of the modern age we would not be in love, not be engaged, not be the reasonably happy and healthy individuals we are. Still, it sucks, big time.
Take the last couple of days, Reg tells me she’s going to be home on Friday night and that she’ll call me. It matters that she’s at home for this short duration because she cannot ring me on her cell phone without incurring a large surcharge as I can’t call her from my mobile, even our landlines require phone cards to not break our banks. So while she is home for a day or so she has to catch me at an hour when she’s free as well as myself which is difficult when I work 7.30 am ( 1:30pm in Ireland ) until 5pm ( 11pm there). On this particular Friday I ended up working until 6 and in the moments when my phone is buzzing and buzzing in my pocket around 5:30 I’m unable to break away from my business for even a moment to answer it. She leaves me a message, a long and sleepy one that makes me feel her love and longing drip over me like warm honey.
Saturday I have to work too and as things just happen to turn out I’m in the shower in the morning when she calls again. This time she doesn’t leave a message. I don’t have time or a card to call her back but I do check my face book to see if she’s messaged me there. She did, it reads; “Hi, please be online.” When you’ve communicated so many intimacies over text as we have you can pick up on subtext like it’s spelled out in big bold capital letters. Knowing that she’s hurting and that it’s probably somehow related to the wedding dress fitting she had scheduled, doesn’t make my already assuredly shitty day any better. Throughout all of the yelling and insults I endure I want only to hear her voice even if it’s crying or venting or hurting. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow when we plan to have our weekly skype date-her good idea- and actually see each other’s faces, the emotions and look into each other’s eyes while saying the sweet things that are in our hearts.
It’s not the same though, it never is. It has been said the I love the best in the littlest ways. In the grasp of a hand or a heartfelt hug and just the same nothing comforts me like her head on my chest and the feel of her lips on mine. These are the hallmarks of a relationship that so many take for granted when they are but a phone call and a short drive away, the reinforcements of love which we fall back on when we are unsure of our worth. But these times apart are what make us a strong couple, because we cannot be there for one another at every moment of weakness and doubt we find the resilience in ourselves to carry on and keep our individual identities strong. In fact all of our relationship is a practice in personal endurance that we chose to put ourselves through for the virtue of true love.
Love is my faith in god replaced with something not quite tangible but still there for me to experience, to enjoy and to be elated by when I give myself wholly to it. True faith takes a commitment beyond the desire for rewards, it asks you to hurt so that it can comfort you in those times of darkness and emptiness. You have to be willing to embrace the pain of separation to make it through a long distance relationship such as this. That’s where the phrase ‘I miss you’ comes into it. ‘I miss you’ takes on the same meaning as ‘I love you’ when we cannot express that love like we mean to, as we yearn to, as we hope to some day be fortunate enough do on a daily basis. ‘I miss you’ is an acknowledgement that we experience the same sense of being incomplete when we are away from one another, it is a confession of that weak feeling that overcomes us in the absence of each other, that very weakness that we feel we must keep contained from the world at large. ‘I miss you’ is what we share, the tie that binds us over the miles and hours which technology can only try to overcome because ‘I miss you’ means ‘you’re worth it and you make it better’ in the cryptography of our communications.
But don’t get me wrong, there is nothing that will make me happier than to forget what it’s like to miss her, to wake up every day next holding her and tell her that I love her every night while she falls asleep. But still there will be times when we are separated by life and the pulls of responsibility, in those times I will call or text Reg my wife and with a silly little smile I will say that I miss her. I know she’ll understand just what that means because she’s been through everything that I have. She understands me down to my heartbeat from one quarter of the world away.
